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My cat Charlie stopped being a lap cat when he came out of his kitten stage. I’m lucky if I get to pet him now without him running away. I call him my little sailor — he spends his days licking at our bathtub or dipping his paws into the water collecting when I wash my face, and I can hear the clink! clink! of him licking at the metal part of the faucet all day. He walks around with the back of his head all spiked up like a punk rocker, wet to the touch. He’s a rebel. He’s interested in things that others like him aren’t. In other words, he’s like his mommy.

One of my significant other’s two cats, Pistol, has become my new lap cat. He is fat, soft, and a beautiful shade of bluish grey. He cries and bangs at our bedroom door if he can’t get in to sleep with me so, much to the protest of my S.O., our bed has gone from being divided in half to divided in thirds. His chubby body holds the covers down and blocks me from pulling them over to my side, he spreads his paws on my face and arms and even tries licking them the entire night, but I happily allow him to take up space and overheat our bed.When his little bladder can’t hold itself any longer, he scratches at the door again, goes out to have a snack and visit the litter box, and then comes right back in bed.

Pistol snores all day, even when he’s awake. They don’t sound like the snores of a dog or a person, but instead they are tiny little whistles and bubbling noises that remind me of the sound of coffee being made in the morning. It was that sound — that sound that so many classify as one of the best sounds in the world — that drew me to him in the first place.

So many people sleep with guns in their bedrooms because their minds are wired to be scared, paranoid or anxious. What’s wrong with me sleeping with a Pistol, then? While I sleep and have more and more terrible dreams, dreams of tsunamis and missing school deadlines and getting cornered by men in alleyways, my Pistol is there whistling his tune of love and positivity.